Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Shit Sucks, Volume 1

Hey everyone, I seem to have developed something of a reputation as excessively positive, and have been called out for it. I've decided that to help combat this, and any perception that I think Skorne is fine as is, I'm going to go through and detail some of the MK3 changes that I really absolutely positively CANNOT stand.

WARNING: CONTAINS SALT

Shit Sucks, Volume 1: The Krea

The krea was a once ubiquitous creature that allowed us to safely deliver our slow moving armies against gunlines. Many was the game wherein my caster sat in the open, protected solely by a krea animus and a few token transfers, safe from all but the most intense of ranged assassinations. My mediocre frontlines, likewise, were much easier to deliver when their stats reached 15/15 under a krea bubble, keeping them at least marginally safe from pow 10 shooting, and able to withstand pow 8 blast damage on average rolls. Gladiators and bronzebacks walked up the table at 14/21, while Morghoul ran rampant, comboing concealment and a krea animus for a 21/15 statline, able to bully the table with his feat knowing that things outside of it couldn't touch his defense, and things within couldn't boost to hit. Hell, the number of times I've enabled my paingivers to clear off my backline thanks to her animus reducing defense is... many times. It happened many times.

Shooting tends to be rather low-power, and without some means to boost it can be rather lackluster against heavies. Add in armor 21 and defense 14, and without some decent focus allocation few things could really threaten titans on the approach. Sure we might take some token damage, but it rarely amounted to anything serious. Unfortunately, as you know the krea animus only boosts defense now. This wouldn't be such a big deal, as defense 14 is just about where you want to be, where rat 7's will only hit you half the time, but the loss of armor buffing coupled with the defense nerfs our heavies took and a krea no longer really offers anything to them. Armor 19 doesn't seem so bad, but when you get hit almost as frequently as a knocked down model nothing really needs to boost to hit you, and access to boosted damage from jack guns is now so common we can readily be shot off the board.

Add in that the Krea herself took a massive hit to defensive stats, and she isn't even able to keep small based infantry alive. They can't screen her worth a damn, and her now pathetic armor and mediocre defense make her a prime target for shooting. Cataphracts, the obvious choice to screen her, are now defense 11 and die to unboosted pow 13 shooting, meaning 1 mediocre shot from a light jack, or a few shots from infantry, that can easily hit def 13, opens a hole to her with no trouble. Sure, you could put her behind some shield walling cetrati, but now you're stuck moving at a glacial pace to protect a defensive support beast for some reason when you're already armor damnnn.

I take her with Ferox, but as my tables keep evolving to include more central obstructions, forests, and general protection against shooting, I can't help but feel I'm better served utilizing these pieces to keep them safe and let them act more mobile.

If we had just lost defense on the many things that lost defense, the krea would still be useful. If her animus had just changed so that we had to settle on 14/19 on the approach we'd still be respectable, as enemies would have to decide if they wanted to allocate focus to boost to hit and damage, or risk missing half the time or more. Instead we're left with a support beast that needs excessive support to stay alive, and doesn't really offer much to keep us safe from some popular gunlines out there. Best case scenario your opponent ignores whatever the krea is protecting and just pops your heavies with boosted damage rolls.

This, in my opinion, is the biggest nerf to Skorne in mk 3. Not just the changes to the krea, but how other models changed in relation to her as well. We can no longer buff our best protection against shooting (armor), and we've lost enough defense that her support doesn't matter enough. This shit sucks.